The question we will face in the coming years is whether we can trust governments in Ireland to take wise budgetary decisions that are in the wider, long-term interests of citizens rather than in the narrow, short-term interests of politicians, lobby groups and powerful banks

Europe is a conglomeration of different economic models, whose various recessions have been provoked by disparate causes requiring distinct remedies. As in a hospital ward where one patient suffers from a broken leg, another gout and another cancer, a common treatment will fail to cure the majority of patients.

As Ireland set about applying to join the EEC in the 1950s the anti-British discourse on which Irish nationalism relied began to look rather specious, set against the evidence of our overwhelming economic dependence on the UK: this was an asymmetrical relationship like no other in Europe.

Between 1926 and 1951, the average number of people confined in industrial schools, reformatories, Magdalene laundries, county homes, mother and baby homes or mental institutions in Ireland was 31,500, or one per cent of the population.

Some people are impressed by the apparent humility of Pope Francis and his objections to market capitalism. But should the left regard him as an ally or is socialism not more about production and plenty than simplicity and austerity?

An academic discipline based on idealised economic systems which permit the application of a great deal of theoretical sophistication has produced cohorts of graduates with little knowledge of history or the real world. These idiot savants can manipulate mathematical models but have little to contribute to actual business practice or economic management.

Our acts of remembrance in this decade of commemoration should perhaps include some consideration of the failures of the past as well as its successes, and indeed the failures of the present. And might this not be a good time to have done with militarism once and for all?

In 2004 a majority endorsed the removal of the right to citizenship of children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents. Along the way, pregnant women legally seeking asylum were cast as illegal immigrants abusing Irish hospitality. A new book argues that an intersection of racism, sexism, and a ‘heteronormative’ ideology lies behind Irish immigration policy.

The mid-1960s saw a relaxation of old certainties among both communities in Northern Ireland. The unionist leader Terence O’Neill was conscious that it was necessary to offer some remedy to the discrimination that Catholics suffered, but even his mild measures of reform did not win majority support within his own community.

Ireland long had two parties competing for the favour of the Soviet Union. One was to remain tiny and irrelevant; the other found that its strategy of formulating ‘reformist demands in the mouth of a revolutionary party’ was not sustainable as reformism became for leading members not a pose but their real ideological home.